Macintosh

Murphy's law and it's corollaries dictate that not only will things that can go wrong will go wrong, but they will do so at the least possible convenient time. Thus it was that at the end of April as I was getting ready to transition to a few months of full-time travel Apple's Mail app decided to head south. The main symptom was an incredible use of memory. I could launch Mail and a short time later not only would all 8GB of RAM in my machine be swallowed up but it would be using 20GB more on disk for swap space. All and all a totally unusable situation. Read more about Benefits from the OS X 10.6.4 update

Dave Winer muses today on the possibility of cars with WiFi. I'm not sure I'm wanting to wait for the auto makers to figure this one out. His post expresses a thought I've had for a while. Our cars need to be able to connect to our houses and to other Wifi networks we might see along the road. Now with some tools like USB cable modems the possibility of being connected in more places is even possible (though doing much music syncing on EDGE would be slow).

Several folks have already done modifications to put Mac minis in cars. We already know that these little computers can drive the car on their own so why not expect a complete data system. At the end of the day I'm thinking I'd rather have an after-market system that easily plugs into the car over a system that comes with the car. The Prius has a great GPS but since it doesn't interface with the systems I use it is less useful than it could be. While an interface would make it more useful, it would still be yet another system and type of system to figure out how to integrate.

We have a sick MacBook on our hands. Fortunately (we hope) it is not the dreaded restart problem that some have had. Rather the cause is a battery issue where the battery is not recognized after it was fully drained and the computer left unplugged overnight.

Of course this is probably a decent time for it to break because the only thing we'll miss is yet another post about Google buying You Tube.

Mac Slash writes about evidence Apple is dropping G3 Server support and speculates on the possibility of Apple ending G3 client support. They wonder whether people left behind will possibly not buy Apple computers again.

Two responses come to mind. First there are Apple users who are still upset that the operating system isn't OS 9 anymore. Second, it is not like users stuck with only OS X 10.4.7 are in terrible shape... having a modern operating system on a computer that's nearly a decade old. Certainly some were purchased only 5 years ago, but in computer years 5 years is a darn good run.